Dunno if this has been posted yet but its very cool. I love playing football.

A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.
A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.
Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially brining the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.
"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

Warping space-time
An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.
Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all.
"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."
With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.
The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.
But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.
Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.
"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."

Laboratory tests
White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.
They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps.
"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.
He called the project a "humble experiment" compared to what would be needed for a real warp drive, but said it represents a promising first step.
And other scientists stressed that even outlandish-sounding ideas, such as the warp drive, need to be considered if humanity is serious about traveling to other stars.
"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, were going to have to be a little bit audacious," Obousy said.

If the universe exists, it was made.. Within those same rules anything can happen.. Amazing to think this is becoming plausible now a days.. I <3 an elegant solution.. E=MC2 is elegant and simple..
This thing seems just simple and elegant enough to have a shot maybe.. I sure hope people start looking into it anyway.. The other things something like this could be applied to are endless..

PS: I just never know when TMM is trolling anymore...lol.. I brace myself for the coming ridicule for giving this possible credance.. XD

If the universe exists, it was made.. Within those same rules anything can happen.. Amazing to think this is becoming plausible now a days.. I <3 an elegant solution.. E=MC2 is elegant and simple..
This thing seems just simple and elegant enough to have a shot maybe.. I sure hope people start looking into it anyway.. The other things something like this could be applied to are endless..

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It seems simple due to the media outlet I quoted. Believe me its VASTLY more complected then a football floating inside a woman's diaphragm.

Actually, I think Vulcan ships are a more logical choice for the this story.

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Yep that's what I thought when I saw the picture and read the description. Vulcan ships are actually the only ones capable of warp travel.

On a more serious note, I'd like to be able to see a real development on this during my lifetime (I'm 29), but I don't expect to see an actual drive anytime soon. It's like Da Vinci and it's flying machines. I have little doubt that if posible scientists will find the science behind warp travel in say, the next 25 years, but I think we are easily 100-200 years away from having the technology to actually build one, if at all posible.

Just as I expected, Gene Roddenberry was given some ideas from a future civilization with time travel in order to speed up technology's progress. Really it makes sense.

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Well duuuh, we know that already...

It is interesting to always see how the world prefers to keep thinking it is flat..
It's not.

I can't laugh off any possibilities, especially ones that Einstein has made efforts in..
Light and radio were unthinkiable at one point. I think this will be like a microwave oven in a couple hundred years..
Just another common household appliance, for all I know..
The potential is there..
We keep thinking so flatly, but the only way we will ever change, is to do what these people are doing.
Think outside the box..

Sounds like the same creative accounting we use in the euro zone to fix the crisis.

Are those power levels quoted in E=mc² ? Anyone want to do some math to figure out how many kWh in 1 gram of matter (using E=mc²)

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Creative accounting kept me out of jail a few years back. It works.

On a serious note I think the guy who is "testing" this hasn't had a real peer review yet. Unless hes discovered something mathematically scientist have been missing for about 90 years now its BS........or this is just fluff to get a nice fat grant. NASA has been gutted the last few years. They need to rattle some cages.

Meh, it's easy to scoff at untestable and unproven theories.. It's harder to come up with them in the first place.. I'm just happy people are trying to go beyond the physical and reach a deeper understanding, on how everything works.

On a serious note I think the guy who is "testing" this hasn't had a real peer review yet. Unless hes discovered something mathematically scientist have been missing for about 90 years now its BS........or this is just fluff to get a nice fat grant. NASA has been gutted the last few years. They need to rattle some cages.

doesn't such a warp drive enable FTL information transfer (yes i know the ship itself is not travelling faster than c) ? Which would violate causality?

Real "Warp Drive" soon.
Real "Time Machine" soon.

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I don't think so, because nothing moved faster than light and that's what causality says in the end. I'm no expert at all, but as far as I remember causality goes hand in hand with the principle of locality. Within the local frame light would still travel at light speed and much faster than anything else, hence causality is not violated. I think.

EDIT: Hmm I now understand what TMM meant with the worm hole argument. And yes it is exactly the same. For those who don't know what it means (like me), this is it:

The impossibility of faster-than-light relative speed only applies locally. Wormholes allow superluminal (faster-than-light) travel by ensuring that the speed of light is not exceeded locally at any time. While traveling through a wormhole, subluminal (slower-than-light) speeds are used. If two points are connected by a wormhole, the time taken to traverse it would be less than the time it would take a light beam to make the journey if it took a path through the space outside the wormhole. However, a light beam traveling through the wormhole would always beat the traveler. As an analogy, running around to the opposite side of a mountain at maximum speed may take longer than walking through a tunnel crossing it.